1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system and method for managing human resources for an organization. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system and method for allowing management to collaborate on personnel issues while maintaining confidentiality of individuals.
2. Description of the Related Art
Managers in modern business organizations have increasingly complex roles to perform in managing the various facets of the business organization. While managers differ greatly in the objectives and goals of their respective departments or areas, a key element that most managers deal with are the employees in their department or area and their efforts to retain a highly talented pool of employees while staying within given resource requirements, such as salary and stock budgets.
Today managers and human resource leaders have limited information available for fairly reviewing employee performance, assessing the risk of individuals leaving the organization and identifying those individuals most likely to leave, fairly awarding salary increases and stock incentives based upon employee performance and the desire to retain more talented employees, and accurately comparing compensation received by the manager's employees with meaningful benchmarks.
Many managers today react to problems, such as key talent leaving the organization, rather than engaging in pre-planning activities to identify situations that eventually lead to such problems. The reason for reacting, rather than planning, for employee issues is the difficulty of organizing and tracking many disparate pieces of data about employees. Managers are often provided with different reports regarding employees' salaries, stock options, and other rewards. In separate paper or computer files the manager may keep records of employee performance reviews and the general trend of employees in terms of performance ratings. Managers are challenged, however, when comparing employees to benchmark averages or simply other employees in the same organization. Mid-level managers are often left to rely on immediate managers to fairly and accurately rate employee performances and reward the performances accordingly.
On an annual, or other periodic, basis managers review the employees performance and award salary increases, awards, and stock incentives to those individual employees deemed more critical to the organization. In large organizations, managers, especially mid-level managers, are challenged by the fact that employees are not rewarded similarly based in large part on the employees' immediate manager. While some managers are able to obtain many awards and salary increases for many members of their department, other managers struggle to obtain marginal rewards for their better employees. This dichotomy in management treatment has almost as many reasons as there are managers. Some managers may feel that their employees are handsomely paid when, in actuality, the employees' compensation is far below that of their peers. Other managers may try and keep costs in an area or department low in order to impress the manager's superiors. On the other side of the coin, managers may overly reward lower contribution to the organization in order to build a loyal team of employees or because the manager does not realize that the performance of his employees is generally less than that of other employees in the organization.
To address fairness issues, many organizations have management meetings to discuss the relative merit of employees being managed by a group of managers. These meetings often involve discussing many employees individually without clear comparisons between an employee and his or her peers. A mid-level, or project manager, often has difficulty in determining whether compensation and other awards are doled out fairly. Once again, the mid-level manager has little objective information at hand to determine whether inequities exist between employees. When a talented employee leaves the organization for a better opportunity elsewhere, it often is only discovered through discussions with the parting employee that the employee was being under compensated.
Some awards, such as stock option awards, can be used as an incentive to retain an organization's most talented employees, especially those employees whose talents are highly marketable to other organizations. The stock options granted usually vest over some number of years making it financially advantageous to the employee to remain with the organization until the options vest. While stock options are often used to retain employees, the award of options is often not coupled with a risk assessment system that identifies those employees that are highly talented and, based on talents or individual employee factors, are at a high risk of leaving the organization.
If risk assessment concerning employee retention is even performed at most organizations, it is usually based solely on the manager's intuition or feeling regarding whether an employee will leave the organization. A list of employees that might choose to leave the company might be provided to upper management for consideration. However, once again it is difficult for mid-management to understand which of the employees identified as a “flight risk” is truly a high contributor, and which are marginal or poor contributors that simply complain to management that they might seek employment at another organization.
Another challenge with traditional organizations is that human resources (HR) programs and assistance is not integrated with the particular functions, such as compensation planning, that are performed by managers. As such, these programs and guidelines are reviewed separately by managers and then applied later when the manager performs the various functions. Lack of understanding or attention to human resources programs leads to additional challenges when managers attempt to implement or use the HR programs.
What is needed, therefore, is a system and method to collect, manage, and analyze information regarding an organization's personnel in a complete and systematic way. It is desired that each level of management is integrated with the system along with human resources personnel in order to provide the various levels of management and human resources with the information needed by the particular individuals. A system and method for reviewing employee contributions is needed to adequately assess each employee's contribution in light of contributions made by his or her peers. A system and method is also needed for performing risk assessment and identifying those individuals making high contributions and with a higher risk of leaving the organization for another opportunity. A system and method is further needed to use the contribution and risk assessment data in planning employees' compensation and other awards. A system and method is needed to facilitate management meetings in order to discuss employee contributions without revealing sensitive, or confidential, information pertaining to the individual members of the management team. Finally, a system and method is needed to provide for flexibility in management structure as well as addressing unplanned organizational events or data that needs to be tracked for individual employees.